The Paradox of Prohibition

The most ambitious, most widely supported, and most uncompromising attempt to modify the behavior of Americans was, of course, Prohibition. Not at all incidentally, it was also a colossal failure.

It was actually harder to get alcohol once prohibition was replaced with regulations. Maybe this is what the mayor really has in mind.

This wasn’t, as some believe, because you can’t legislate morality. It was because you can’t successfully legislate human desire. Virtually every culture since the dawn of our species has tried to outlaw prostitution, and as far as I know, none has yet succeeded; if people really want to do something, and there isn’t an immediate and universally acknowledged victim, they will find their way to do it, irrespective of laws and regulations.

If anything, the effort to evade sumptuary laws provokes imagination and innovation among the evaders, who find new ways to get what they want. In Prohibition, this meant adding flavorings to industrial alcohol, or obtaining booze with perfectly legal medical prescriptions, or purchasing “wine bricks” -- dehydrated slabs of pressed grapes -- and learning from the winking label that adding water and storing in a dark place could be a problem, because “it might ferment and become wine.”

The great paradox of Prohibition is that once it was repealed, it became harder for Americans to acquire alcohol. During the dry years, illegal operators needed only to bribe a cop or two, and then open their establishments to all comers, at any time of day; if a 14-year-old wanted to score a bottle of rye on his way to school at 8 a.m., there were plenty of people ready to sell it to him. Along came Repeal, and suddenly a new regime of regulations -- age limits, closing hours, geographic proscriptions -- made that bottle a lot harder to come by.

I imagine this is the sort of situation the mayor anticipates. By applying his rules to restaurants and other sellers, whom the city regulates in so many ways, he can create an environment that will make a large portion of diluted, carbonated sugar hard to get.